June 18, 2022
Forgiveness is a funny concept. Asking for another person’s forgiveness can be a more strenuous task than trying to make a broken record work. The words that we need to hear to move on with our lives may never reach our ears. However, I have come to find that this type of forgiveness is not the most difficult one to attain. The hardest forgiveness is the one given to oneself. I think it’s easy to play into a narrative that allows us to beat ourselves up repeatedly with our past shortcomings. Especially in the social construct we subscribe to on the daily. I think we like to paint an image that we want people to change and be better versions of their past selves, however it is rarely put into practice. It is much easier to compartmentalize someone into a box and leave them there. We don’t really want to do the work to allow people the opportunity to thrive in healthy change. That conditioning plays a huge part in how we forgive ourselves or rather how we don’t forgive ourselves. We must allow ourselves to be champions of our own hearts. Sometimes this means forgiving ourselves, as mentioned earlier for our past shortcomings. Other times, it’s forgiving ourselves for loving someone as hard as we did and they did not, in fact, deserve our energies at all. Let’s take a moment to acknowledge our humanity and what all that entails and then move forward with grace. Because why would anyone else be willing to give us a second chance if we cannot even convince our own selves that we deserve it?
– New Flame